Anton

Anton is a special purpose supercomputer for biomolecular simulation designed and constructed by D. E. Shaw Research (DESRES). PSC's current system is known as Anton 2 and is a successor to the original Anton 1 machine hosted here.

Anton 2, the next-generation Anton supercomputer, is a 128 node system, made available without cost by DESRES for non-commercial research use by US universities and other not-for-profit institutions, and is hosted by PSC with support from the NIH National Institute of General Medical Sciences. It replaced the original Anton 1 system in the fall of 2016.

Anton was designed to dramatically increase the speed of molecular dynamics (MD) simulations compared with the previous state of the art, allowing biomedical researchers to understand the motions and interactions of proteins and other biologically important molecules over much longer time periods than was previously accessible to computational study. The MD research community is using the Anton 2 machine at PSC to investigate important biological phenomena that due to their intrinsically long time scales have been outside the reach of even the most powerful general-purpose scientific computers. Application areas include biomolecular energy transformation, ion channel selectivity and gating, drug interactions with proteins and nucleic acids, protein folding and protein-membrane signaling.

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Anton 2 is allocated annually via a Request for Proposal with proposals reviewed by a committee convened by the National Research Council at the National Academies. To qualify for an allocation on Anton 2, the principal investigator must be a faculty or staff member at a U.S. academic or non-profit research institution.

Applications are not being accepted currently. The RFP for allocations to begin in December 2019 will open in the spring of 2019.

Anton End User Agreement

All users who are awarded time on Anton2 must complete the Anton End User Agreement (EUA) acknowledging that they have read and understood their responsibilities as an Anton2 user and agree to comply. Once it is signed, return the EUA to grants@psc.edu.

Acknowledgement in publications

Please use the following paragraph (or similiar) to cite your work conducted on Anton. Proper acknowledgment is critical for our ability to solicit continued funding for the project.

Acknowledgement for Anton 2

Anton 2 computer time was provided by the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) through Grant R01GM116961 from the National Institutes of Health. The Anton 2 machine at PSC was generously made available by D.E. Shaw Research.

Acknowledgement for Anton 1

Anton computer time was provided by the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) through Grant R01GM116961 from the National Institutes of Health. The Anton machine at PSC was generously made available by D.E. Shaw Research.

Kink formation is required for lateral gating in BamA - Simulations of BamA reveal a dynamic gating between the N- and C-terminal strands at the barrel seam. Using free-energy calculations and mutagenesis experiments, it was determined that the C-terminus has to kink inward for efficient opening. lateral gating in BamA. Karl Lundquist, Jeremy Bakelar, Nicholas Noinaj, and JC Gumbart. doi:10.1073/pnas.1722530115

Inner Space - Work on Anton highlights the importance of empty space for protein function. Simulations of T4 lysozyme L99A show that big gaps opened up in the protein, which “let in” molecules roughly the size of drug molecules. From PSC's Science Highlights Fall 2017.

Hooked Up - Simulations on Anton discover the critical role disulfides play in holding together MCoTI-II, a natural pesticide that would fall apart without disulfide bridges. From PSC's Science Highlights Spring 2017.

This article was highlighted in the cover of Nature Physics and discussed in the following article: Metzler R, News and Views Protein physics: Forever ageing, Nature Phys., 2016, 12, 113–114, doi:10.1038/nphys3585.

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back - molecular dynamics simulations disclose how water leaving and then re-entering the potassium channel delays its return to the active state, from PSC's Projects in Scientific Computing, Spring 2014.

A Movie is Worth a Million Pictures - structural dynamics simulations illuminate the mechanisms of sodium-coupled substrate binding/release in an aspartate transporter, from PSC's 2013 annual report, Projects in Scientific Computing

Gibbs, Eric B., and Scott A. Showalter. “Quantification of Compactness and Local Order in the Ensemble of the I ntrinsically Disordered Protein FCP1.” The Journal of Physical Chemistry B 120, no. 34 (September 2016): 8960–69. doi:10.1021/acs. jpcb.6b06934.

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Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center

PSC is a joint effort of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. Established in 1986, PSC is supported by several federal agencies, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and private industry and is a leading partner in XSEDE (Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment), the National Science Foundation cyber-infrastructure program.